Part 2 (1/2)
What Dante leaves to us as his ultimate gift is his pride and his humility. The one answers the other. And both put us to shame. He, alone of great artists, holds in his hand the true sword of the Spirit for the dividing asunder of men and things. There is no necessity to lay all the stress upon the division between the Lower and the Higher Love, between h.e.l.l and Heaven. There are other _distinctions_ in life than these. And between all distinctions, between all those differences which separate the ”fine” from the ”base,” the n.o.ble from the ign.o.ble, the beautiful from the hideous, the generous from the mean; Dante draws the pitiless sword-stroke of that ”eternal separation” which is the most tragic thing in the world. In the truest sense tragic! For so many things, and so many people, that must be thus ”cut off,” are among those who harrow our hearts with the deadliest attraction and are so wistful in their weakness. Through the mists and mephitic smoke of our confused age--our age that cries out to be beyond the good, when it is beneath the beautiful--through the thick air of indolence masquerading as toleration and indifference posing as sympathy, flashes the scorching sword of the Florentine's Disdain, dividing the just from the unjust, the true from the false, and the heroic from the commonplace. What matter if his ”division” is not our ”division,”
his ”formula” our ”formula”? It is good for us to be confronted with such Disdain. It brings us back once more to ”Values”; and whether our ”Values” are values of taste or values of devotion what matter?
Life becomes once more arresting. The everlasting Drama recovers its ”Tone”; and the high Liturgy of the last Illusion rolls forward to its own Music!
That Angel of G.o.d, who when their hearts were shaken with fear before the flame-lit walls of Dis, came, so straight across the waters, and quelled the insolence of h.e.l.l; with what Disdain he turns away his face, even from those he has come to save!
These ”messengers” of G.o.d, who have so superb a contempt for all created things, does one not meet them, sometimes, even in this life, as they pa.s.s us by upon their secret errands?
The beginning of the Inferno contains the cruellest judgment upon our generation ever uttered. It is so exactly adapted to the spirit of this age that, hearing it, one staggers as if from a stab. Are we not this very tribe of caitiffs who have committed the ”Great Refusal?”
Are we not these very wretches whose blind life is so base that they envy every other Fate? Are we not those who are neither for G.o.d or for his Enemies but are ”for themselves”; those who may not even take refuge in h.e.l.l, lest the one d.a.m.ned get glory of them! The very terror of this clear-cutting sword-sweep, dividing us, bone from bone, may, nay! probably will, send us back to our gentle ”lovers of humanity” who, ”knowing everything pardon everything.” But one sometimes wonders whether a life all ”irony,” all ”pity,” all urbane ”interest,” would not lose the savor of its taste! There is a danger, not only to our moral sense, but to our immoral sense, in that genial air of universal acceptance which has become the fas.h.i.+on.
What if, after all--even though this universe be so poor a farce--the mad lovers and haters, the terrible prophets and artists, _were right?_
Suppose the farce had a climax, a catastrophe! One loves to repeat ”all is possible;” but _that_ particular possibility has little attraction.
It would be indeed an anti-climax if the queer Comedy we have so daintily been patronizing turned out to be a Divine Comedy--and ourselves the point of the jest! Not that this is very likely to occur. It is more in accordance with what we know of the terrestrial stage that in this wager of faith with un-faith neither will ever discover who really won!
But Dante's ”Disdain” is not confined to the winners in the cosmic dicing match. There are heroic hearts in h.e.l.l who, for all their despair, still yield not, nor abate a jot of their courage. Such a one was that great Ghibelline Chief who was lost for ”denying immortality.” ”If my people fled from thy people--_that_ more torments me than this flame.” In one respect Dante is, beyond doubt, the greatest poet of the world. I mean in his power of heightening the glory and the terribleness of the human race. Across the three-fold kingdom of his ”Terza Rima” pa.s.ses, in tragic array, the whole procession of human history--and each figure there, each solitary person, whether of the Blessed or the Purged, or the Condemned, wears, like a garment of fire, the dreadful dignity of having been a man! The moving sword-point that flashes, first upon one and then upon another, amid our dim transactions, is nothing but the angry arm of human imagination, moulding life to grander issues; _creating,_ if not discovering, sublimer laws.
In conveying that thrilling sense of the momentousness of human destiny which beyond anything else certain historic names evoke, none can surpa.s.s him. The brief, branding lines, with which the enemies of G.o.d are engraved upon their monuments ”more lasting than bra.s.s,” seem to add a glory to d.a.m.nation. Who can forget how that ”Simonist” and ”Son of Sodom” lifts his hands up out of the deepest Pit, and makes ”the fig” at G.o.d? ”Take it, G.o.d, for at Thee I aim it!” There is a sting of furious blasphemy in this; _personal outrage_ that goes beyond all limits.
Yet who is there, but does not feel _glad_ that the ”Pistoian” uttered what he uttered--out of his h.e.l.l--to his Maker?
Is not Newman right when he says that the heart of man does not naturally ”love G.o.d?”
But perhaps in the whole poem nothing is more beautiful than that great roll of honor of the unchristened Dead, who make up the company of the n.o.ble Heathen. Sad, but not unhappy, they walk to and fro in their Pagan Hades, and occupy themselves, as of old, in discoursing upon philosophy and poetry and the Mystery of Life.
Those single lines, devoted to such names, are unlike anything else in literature. That ”Caesar, in armour, with Ger-Falcon eyes,”
challenges one's obeisance as a great shout of his own legionaries, while that ”Alone, by himself, the Soldan” bows to the dust our Christian pride, as the Turbaned Commander of the Faithful, with his ghostly crescent blade, strides past, dreaming of the Desert.
It is in touches like these, surely, rather than in the Beatrice scenes or the devil scenes, that the poet is most himself.
It needs, perhaps, a certain smouldering dramatic pa.s.sion, in regard to the whole spectacle of human life, to do justice to such lines. It needs also that mixture of disdain and humility which is his own paramount attribute.
And the same smouldering furnace of ”reverence” characterizes Dante's use of the older literatures. No writer who has ever lived has such a dramatic sense of the ”great effects” in style, and the ritual of words.
That pa.s.sage, _”Thou_ art my master and my author. It is from _thee_ I learnt the beautiful style that has done me so much honour,”
with its reiteration of the rhythmic syllables of ”honour,” opens up a salutary field of aesthetic contemplation. His quotations, too, from the Psalms, and from the Roman Liturgy, become, by their imaginative inclusion, part of his own creative genius. That ”Vexilla regis prodeunt Inferni!” Who can hear it without the same thrill, as when Napoleonic trumpets heralded the Emperor! In the presence of such moments the whole elaboration of the Beatrice Cult falls away.
That romantic perversion of the s.e.x instinct is but the psychic motive force. Once started on his splendid and terrible road, the poet forgets everything except the ”Principle of Beauty” and the ”Memory of Great Men.” Parallel with these things is Dante's pa.s.sion of reverence for the old historic places--provinces, cities, rivers and valleys of his native Italy. Even when he lifts up his voice to curse them, as he curses his own Firenze, it is but an inversion of the same mood. The cities where men dwelt then took to themselves living personalities; and Dante, who in love and hate was Italian of the Italians, was left indifferent by none of these. How strange to modern ears this thrill of recognition, when one exile, even among the dead, meets another, of their common citizens.h.i.+p of ”no mean city!” Of this cla.s.sic ”patriotism” the world requires a Renaissance, that we may be saved from the shallowness of artificial commercial Empires. The new ”inter-nationalism” is the sinister product of a generation that has grown ”deracinated,” that has lost its roots in the soil. It is an Anglo-Germanic thing and opposed to it the proud tenacity of the Latin race turns, even today, to what Barres calls the ”wors.h.i.+p of one's Dead.”
Anglo-Saxon Industrialism, Teutonic Organization, have their world place; but it is to the Latin, and, it may be, to the Slav also, that the human spirit must turn in those subtler hours when it cannot ”live by bread alone.”
The modern international empires may obliterate local boundaries and trample on local altars. In spite of them, and in defiance of them, the soul of an ancient race lives on, its saints and its artists forging the urn of its Phoenix-ashes!
Dante himself, dreaming over the high Virgilian Prophecy of a World-State, under a Spiritual Caesar, yearned to restore the Pax Romana to a chaotic world. Such a vision, such an Orbis Terrarum at the feet of Christ, has no element in common with the material dominance of modern commercial empires. It much more closely resembles certain Utopias of the modern Revolutionary. In its spirit it is not less Latin than the traditional customs of the City-States it would include. Its real implication may be found in the a.s.similative genius of the Catholic Church, consecrating but not effacing local altars; transforming, but not destroying, local pieties. Who can deny that this formidable vision answers the deepest need of the modern world?
The discovery of some Planetary Synthesis within the circle of which all the pa.s.sionate race cults may flourish; growing not less intense but more intense, under the new World-City--this is nothing else than what the soul of the earth, ”dreaming on things to come”
may actually be evolving.
Who knows if the new prominence given by the war to Russian thought may not incredibly hasten such a Vita Nuova? We know that the Pan-Slavic dream, even from the days of Ivan the Terrible, has been of this spiritual unity, and it may be remembered that it was always from ”beyond the Alps” that Dante looked for the Liberator. Who knows? The great surging antipodal tides of life lash one another into foam. Out of chaos stars are born. And it may be the madness of a dream even so much as to speak of ”unity” while creation seethes and hisses in its terrible vortex. Mockingly laugh the imps of irony, while the Saints keep their vigil. Man is a surprising animal; by no means always bent on his own redemption; sometimes bent on his own destruction!